A reader and writer fooling with words

Do you Yomp?

This week’s word is yomping, partly because I love how it entered the English language, but mostly because I adore how it sounds (pronunciation here from the Oxford English Dictionary).

Yomping Boots

What does yomping mean? It means to run over rough terrain, generally in a military context. According to Graeme Donald’s excellent book “Sticklers, Sideburns and Bikinis” it was originally used as yumping in the the 1960s to describe the bouncy progress of rally drivers on forest stages, especially when they caught air over bumps, and was a joke about how Scandinavians would say “jumping”. Finnish drivers have a great record in that form of intense driving.

The British marine corps did their winter weather training there and picked up the joke to describe their own progress over uneven ground. When they fought the Falklands War (1982) the phrase bled into general usage.

An alternative story is that it is short for Your Own Marching Pace, which may be true but I love the idea of it jumping from rallying to the foot version of conquering muddy landscapes.